High-fidelity modelling of hydrogen-fired industrial combustors for steel manufacturing furnaces. per el Barcelona Supercomputing Center

The stringent emission regulations and the EU commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 (EU Commission, COM (2018) 773) is driving the power generation industry to prioritize the development of low-carbon technologies. To meet the European decarbonization objectives, the energy-intensive industrial sectors must be transformed in terms of low-carbon technology deployment. The metallurgical sector, with a high dependency on fossil fuels, could strongly benefit from clean combustion technologies and the use of cleaner and more sustainable fuels. Hydrogen and hydrogen-enriched fuels have significant potential to enable the transition to a clean, low-carbon energy system. Nonetheless, reducing the emissions to the levels of the EU targets brings new challenges to the industrial sector and to the metallurgical sector, which is responsible for a large portion of the pollutant emissions produced in the industrial sector and has a high dependency on fossil fuel supply. Today, the industrial sector requires more efficient burners, which implies not only a reduction in fuel consumption, but also in carbon emissions, CO2, and pollutant emissions, particularly NOx. While the first goal can be achieved by the use of hydrogen as a fuel, for the second one there exist a variety of approaches, being one of them oxy-fuel combustion. Despite its advantages, oxy-fuel combustion poses a series of challenges that require a systematic analysis. Indeed, the greater temperatures reached reinforce the importance of thermal radiation on these flames and, therefore, its modelling is addressed in this context as a major goal.

Within this context, the candidate will develop a research activity which will comprise the development of a High-Performance Computing (HPC) platform to conduct high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of the furnace. The numerical simulations will be conducted with the multiphysics code Alya from BSC with the aim of obtaining further understanding on the combustion performance and dynamics after hydrogen is blended with natural gas and generate datasets for data analysis. These activities are conducted in the context of an EU project from Horizon Europe and the National Government from Spain in collaboration with a metallurgical company.

The applicant will join the Propulsion Technologies Group (PTG), a research group from the Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (CASE) Department at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. As part of the PTG, the applicant will form part of a multidisciplinary team of researchers with a strong background on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), combustion and multiphase flows. The PTG is actively involved in several European research-oriented and industrial projects for which results are disseminated in highly ranked scientific journals and conferences.

The applicant is expected to work on the execution of these simulations and development of reduced-order models based on data-analytics and machine learning using Computational Fluid Dynamics with High-Performance Computing (HPC) techniques.

Key Duties

• Conducting high-fidelity combustion simulations of hydrogen flames using LES with tabulated chemistry.
• Characterization of oxy-fuel combustion
• Interact with the different partners of the projects to carry our collaborative research.
• Contribute to scientific publications and reporting to different National and EU projects the researcher will be involved in.

Data de tancament: Dimarts, 16 Gener, 2024

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